GNOME Shell is the new core user interface for GNOME 3. GNOME Shell 2.29.0 brings a lot of new features and improvements, the most noticeable being a new message tray showing notifications sliding into the bottom of the screen, a status area for past notifications, the ability to set your presence to the user status menu, switching the overview between a grid and linear view of workspaces.

I tried the last version of GNOME-Shell, and I thought it was a very cool idea. The only problems were that:

* Text in some places was HUGE (i.e. like 500pt or something like that!)
* There was no way to move the panel to the bottom of the screen (which makes it pointless to use Chrome, the tabs are the only reason I use it over Firefox)
* It was kind of slow
* It was lacking polish

Now, with this release, all these issues are still there (although it feels a bit more polished), but it is even slower! It is completely unusable (i915 GPU, in case it matters).

I have a feeling that it is their large reliance on JavaScript, instead of using something like Vala or Genie that would be faster and still relatively easy to develop.